Текст книги "The Gift of Death"

Автор книги: Sam Ripley

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5

Kate drove down Santa Monica Boulevard, occasionally glancing up at the hills of Griffith Park. She turned left into North Vermont, past a cinema, a couple of cool-looking cafes and a bookshop and into the maze of streets that lay to the east of the avenue. She parked just off the intersection of Franklin and Hillhurst, around the corner from the public library, and walked until she found the Gables’ home.

The house looked like any other on the street – a single-storey structure that stood in its own small plot of land, with a patchy, yellowing lawn and a few scraggly plants in pots out front. She paused by the gate, nervous about what she would find inside. She tried to imagine what it must be like to carry a child, give birth, all those hours spent nurturing, feeding, loving, only to have your baby snatched from you. The panic. The desperation. The terror. Hours spent waiting, hoping for the best. Then to discover somebody had snuffed out its life by deliberately dumping it into the sea, where it had been left to die. What could she say to make them feel any better? What could she do to take away their pain? Nothing. But they wanted to see her. To thank her. But what had she done? No matter how hard she had tried she hadn’t been able to save that child’s life.

She took a deep breath, opened the gate and approached the porch. She ran her hands through her hair, and nervously bit her lip as she rang the bell and waited. A moment later a young dark-haired man – short, stocky and muscular – opened the door. Kate saw the recognisable signs of grief etched into his face: circles of red ringed around the eyes, pale skin, haunted eyes.

‘I’m Joe,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘We’re so pleased you could come, Dr – it is doctor, isn’t it? – Dr Cramer. This way, my wife is inside.’

All the blinds of the house had been drawn, but a couple of table lights cast an artificial glow over the interior. In the corner, in a wicker rocking chair, sat a pale, thin woman with hair the colour of straw. She gripped the sides of the chair as she rocked back and forth, staring at the ground as she did so.

‘Susan? Susan?’ said Joe, gently as if he were trying to wake his wife from a dream. ‘Dr Cramer is here to see us.’

There was no response except for the creak of the rocking chair moving back and forth over the wooden floor.

‘You’ll have to excuse my wife,’ he said. ‘As you can imagine it’s been a tough few days for us.’

‘I completely understand. I can’t tell you how I was – how sorry I am.’

The air hung heavy with grief.

‘Can I get you a drink? Some Coke, water, beer?’

‘Yes, water would be great.’

‘I won’t be a second,’ said Joe, as he disappeared into the narrow kitchen at the back of the house. ‘So you’re a doctor. Where do you work? In a hospital?’

‘Oh, I’m not a proper doctor,’ she said, suddenly feeling like a fraud. ‘The title – which I have to say I don’t really use now – refers to a doctorate I did when I was studying. I was a forensic anthropologist – I worked closely with the police here in the city – but I’m a photographer now.’

‘I see,’ said Joe, handing her a glass of water. ‘That sounds interesting. Where did you –‘

A harsh, angry voice from the corner of the room stopped him.

‘So you couldn’t have saved my baby’s life anyway.’

‘Susan – you know Dr –‘

‘She just said she isn’t a doctor.’ She said looking up, her eyes full of tears of fury.

‘I know, Susan, but I’m sure she did everything she –‘

‘She did nothing,’ she said, spitting out the words. ‘She let our baby die.’

Joe walked over to his wife and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

‘Honey, I know it’s hard, but now is not the time to –‘

‘To what? What Joe?’ She turned and looked at Kate. ‘We asked you here because we thought you were what you said you were. We wanted to thank you for trying to help Sara-Jane. But now we know that you didn’t help at all.’

Kate knew that the distraught mother’s reaction was normal. She was angry with herself and was just looking for someone else to blame. Yet at that moment Kate wished she had never come. She should have sent them a card, some flowers maybe. But she wasn’t ready for this.

‘Look – I think it’s best if I go,’ she said, turning towards the door. ‘I am sorry for what happened. And Mrs Gable? I’m sorry you thought I was a medic, but I really did everything I could to bring your daughter back.’

‘Dr – Dr Cramer,’ said Joe, lowering his voice and turning towards Kate. ‘Please forgive my wife. She’s not herself. Perhaps if we –‘ He gestured towards the door.

‘Goodbye, Mrs Gable. And sorry.’

There was no response.

Joe and Kate walked out of the house in silence. On the lawn he stopped and apologised once again.

‘Really, there is no need,’ said Kate. ‘When I worked closely with the police I talked to many bereaved family members, Mr Gable, and I can assure you every one of them felt as you wife feels today. Angry. Guilty. Sick to the stomach with misery. I just wish there was more I could do to help.’

‘I’m actually very worried about her,’ said Joe.

‘Losing any one is hard enough, but to lose a baby. I don’t know how I would cope.’ She didn’t want to remind him about the manner of his daughter’s death. Kate thought about the tiny bud inside her and ran a hand over her abdomen.

‘It’s not just that,’ he said. ‘The truth is, in the past, Susan had a history of mental illness. Anorexia in her teens, self-harming too. Ever since I knew her she has been on some sort of medication. But she seemed so much better with Sara-Jane. Like a different person. But now –‘

His shoulders started to shake as he tried to suppress his emotions.

‘If I ever come across the fucker who – who did this, I don’t think I’ll be able to answer for my actions.’

Kate placed a hand on his forearm.

‘I know it must be difficult for you, but I’m certain the person who took your daughter away from you will be brought to justice.’

‘You are?’

‘Yes,’ she said, realising that she was anything but confident. As she said goodbye she found it difficult to meet his eye.

6

Cassie Veringer stretched out her right hand, almost feeling the cool tiles before she actually touched them. Her fingers traced the diamond pattern on the bathroom wall, moving over the ridges and grooves. The layout of the room was so familiar to her – she was sure she could picture it in her head just as well, if not better, than a sighted person – that she didn’t need to use her hands to get around. But it was force of habit.

She used her left arm to feel for the edge of the shower curtain. As she moved towards it she felt the light breeze coming through the window, and smelt the saltiness of the ocean in the air. The plastic curtain rustled in the wind, a sound that took Cassie back to when she was a little girl on her grandfather’s sailboat in the sea off Newport. In her head she still had a clear picture of what he looked like – the head of silver hair, the bronzed, lined face, the glint in his grey eyes.

What would it have been like if she had never been able to see, she asked herself. She tried to imagine it for a moment and couldn’t. Even though she had been completely blind for fifteen years – a result of juvenile glaucoma – at least she had the visual images of her past to call on. She knew what the inside of a rose looked like. And the waves crashing on the shore. When she touched a person’s face now she was able to recall all the noses, foreheads, lips, cheeks, jaw lines and mouths she had seen before to compose a visual portrait in her head. As she turned on the water, took off her light bathrobe and stepped into the shower she remembered how that skill had served her, how it had helped put a man behind bars. That man – if you could dignify him with such a term – had died in prison. But without her help he would have been free to prey on women, to continue – what was it the newspapers had said? – his reign of terror.

As she let the warm water wash over her, she tried to erase those memories from her. The therapist had taught her a technique where she had to imagine washing every trace of him from her and, as she soaped herself, she pictured herself cleansing herself of him, rinsing away every speck of him. He was dirt, scum and he had no place within her. She was free of him now. He was dead and could hurt her no longer.

She was looking forward to a night by herself – and Moisie, her tortoiseshell. Settling down with her new audio book and a glass of chilled white wine. She had had a hard week at work at the charity – there had been a crisis about whether the organisation’s grant would pay for the rent increase on the building – and she had to deal with a deluge of calls from various banks, government divisions and a number of wealthy individuals who had promised, but had so far failed to deliver, generous donations. It looked like the Glaucoma Research Trust would be able to meet the rent hike, but it had not been easy. She had hated to break her date with her friend Gloria, who worked in the public records office, but she knew that she would have been poor company. So she had had to leave a message on her cell, apologising for letting her girlfriend down again. Hopefully she wouldn’t mind. She’d make an effort, take her out somewhere nice for dinner, or to that swanky bar where Gloria had flirted with the waiter.

She squeezed some shampoo onto the palm of her hand, and gently massaged it into her scalp. She felt the scars on her skull, traces of something that had happened in her past. Part of her, yes, of course – there was no denying that – but not the sum of her. She refused to be one of those people whose lives centred around being a victim. She was more than that. She had survived. She had moved on.

Just then she felt something sting in her eye. A drop of shampoo. She leant back and let the shower run over her forehead and down her face. She moved out of the stream of the water and blinked, but it still hurt. She tried to ignore the discomfort and rinsed herself. As she turned off the shower, and reached for a towel, she thought she heard a noise. She listened – no, it was nothing. But then when her ears were free of water she heard it again. There was someone knocking at the door. Had Gloria not picked up her message? She stepped out of the shower and quickly dried herself. Another knock.

‘Okay, okay, I’m coming,’ she shouted, feeling her way from the bathroom out into the corridor of her apartment.

As she reached the front door – her hand outstretched to open it – she stopped. Hey, how had Gloria managed to get through the main door downstairs? Perhaps somebody had been letting themselves in just as Gloria had turned up? Or maybe Gloria had pressed the buzzer and she hadn’t heard it because of the noise of the shower, but one of her neighbours in the block had buzzed her in? And yet …

A shiver of fear ran down her spine. Her hand retreated from the lock and she took a step back. She traced her way down the corridor to the lounge. Her hands moved over the sofa. Moisie was lying on a cushion at its edge. He started to purr as he felt Cassie’s touch.

‘Everything’s fine, Moisie,’ she said, trying to calm herself. ‘Just fine.’

Cassie picked up her specially-adapted cell phone and spoke into it, asking to be connected to her voicemail. She had one new message.

‘Hi, Cassie, you lightweight.’ It was Gloria in typical upbeat mode. ‘Got your message. Don’t worry about blowing me out – yet again. Suppose I’ll have to enjoy another night in with my secret admirer.’

Cassie tried to laugh – that was the name Gloria called her vibrator – but she couldn’t. The message only filled her with more fear.

If that wasn’t Gloria at the door then who was it?

She sat on the edge of the sofa, paralysed, frozen. Outside her window she heard the sounds of people walking on the boardwalk. A group of boisterous young guys boasting about how much beer they could drink. The high-pitched squeal of a couple of children at play. The passing swish of rollerblades. Help was close at hand if she needed it, she knew that. So what was bugging her?

She stood up and walked around the room, taking a series of deep breaths as she did so. There was probably some logical explanation. It could have been one of her neighbours asking to borrow – surely not a cup of sugar – but a bottle of wine or a tub of ice cream. Maybe it was a courier with a stash of documents relating to the new rental agreement. Or –

There was no point going through all the possibilities, she told herself. She would check it out.

She felt her way down the corridor to the door, careful not to make a sound. As she placed her ear against the door she thought she could hear the beating of her heart. She tried to calm her breathing, thinking that whoever it was on the other side of the door – there was no point trying to tell herself there was no-one – would be able to hear it. Was that the sound of rustling? No, that noise was coming from the direction of the street. Who was that wheezing? She listened carefully, finally realising it was herself. She sat on the floor, cross-legged, and concentrated. She could hear the distant banter of a couple of stallholders further down the promenade and the noise of joggers as they ran past the apartment block – but finally she became convinced that whoever it had been had gone. But then, as she stood up, she heard the quick approach of footsteps and then the sound of a key entering a lock. It was her neighbour, Ron, the gay guy who lived opposite.

She fumbled with the lock and opened the door.

‘Ron, Ron,’ she said, holding her bath robe close to her chest.

‘Hey, what’s up, Cassie. Is everything all right?’

‘Yeah, sure. I thought there was somebody outside the door. You didn’t see anything when you came in? Nothing suspicious?’

‘No, nothing,’ said Ron, removing his shades. ‘You look really freaked out. Do you want me to call anybody?’

‘No, no, I’m fine. I just got carried away, that’s all. Over-active imagination. But there wasn’t a problem with the door down to the –‘

As she shifted position she felt something by her right foot.

‘What -?’ she said, her head automatically dropping down, her sightless eyes moving in the direction of the object.

‘Oh, here’s a package for you,’ said Ron, bending down to pick it up. ‘Looks like there was a courier for you. I guess he must have got someone else to sign for it. Here you go.’

Cassie opened her hands to receive the package, a rectangular cardboard box. Gee, she had worked herself up into such a state. All because of a stupid delivery. It would be the latest batch of audio books she had ordered a couple of days back. A couple of classic English novels – she couldn’t believe she had never read Jane Eyre – as well as an American writer’s account of buying and renovating an old villa in Tuscany and a new CD of Emily Dickenson poetry. She turned the package over in her hands, relief and anticipation running through her in equal measure.

‘Sorry to be such a weirdo, Ron,’ she said. ‘You must think I’m too much.’

‘No worries,’ he said, turning back to open his door. ‘See you around.’

‘Thanks – bye,’ she said, retreating back into her apartment.

She could feel her face stinging with embarrassment. It was occasions like this, she thought to herself as she threw the package onto the sofa, that she was pleased she could not see. At least she was spared the sight of her stupid face in the mirror. She laughed to herself as she opened the icebox and took out the already open bottle of white wine, enjoying the sensation of the chilled glass against her skin. She heard Moisie meow as she entered the kitchen. A moment later he was snaking her way between her bare legs.

‘Your dumb mummy has just made a fool of herself,’ she said, bending down to stroke its head. ‘Nothing new there, I suppose.’

She poured herself a glass of wine and picked up a pair of scissors from the work top. Sometimes these packages were a nightmare to try and open. Last time she had been sent a package she had broken one of her nails on the damn thing. Before she sat down on the sofa she arranged her glass of wine and the scissors on the low-lying wooden table in front of her. She picked up the cardboard package and felt along its outer edge for a tag to pull. Nothing. Gee, that was a surprise.

She reached out for the scissors with her right hand, taking hold of her glass with her left and enjoyed a mouthful of wine. She pushed the glass further into the centre of the table, just so she wouldn’t knock it over and settled back into the comfort of the sofa.

As she started to open the package she realised just how light it was. Perhaps it only contained one of the audio books she had ordered, maybe the other ones would come later in the week. She hoped, if that was the case, that she had been sent Jane Eyre. She was fascinated by what happened to Mr Rochester in the course of the book, intrigued by the idea of a blind romantic hero.

She cut along the top edge of the cardboard, her hands prising open the envelope as she did so. She ripped it open quickly, searching out the square, plastic CD case. This is odd, she thought, as she came across something quite different. It was a long, sausage-shaped object, made of felt, with a zipper running down its middle. What was it? Her hands turned it over, her fingers running down the length of the zipper, feeling its ridges down its spine. At its top end was a toggle which she pulled towards her. It was a pencil case, she realised, the kind she used to have when she was a child.

With one hand she held the case open, while with the other she searched inside its soft folds. For a moment she hesitated as fear threatened to surge up inside her again. It was only a kid’s pencil case, for god’s sake, obviously delivered to the wrong address. Perhaps it had been found by a passer-by who assumed it had been lost by one of the children inside the apartment block. Who had kids? There was Nadia and Jim, on the fifth floor, they had a couple. Then there was that gay couple – Janine and Debbie – and she thought there was another guy, a weekend dad, who had a six– and an eight-year old. She’d probably find a clue inside if she kept looking.

Just then she felt something – a small, nugget shaped object – at the bottom of the case. What was it? An eraser? But one of its outer edges seemed wet, sticky even. She picked it up between her thumb and forefinger and brought it out of the pencil case. As she examined it she felt the slight, almost indistinguishable, contours that seemed to run around one of its surfaces. Then there was something sharp, an edge that formed itself into a half-moon shape and another surface that was flat, harder. She turned it around in her hands, feeling the stickiness begin to spread across her palms. As she brought it up to her face she smelt the unmistakable stench of blood. She felt fear begin to stifle her. She threw what was in her hands onto the floor, steadying herself on the sofa as she tried to stop herself from retching.

She ran to the door, wrenched it open and finally screamed.

‘Ron! Help. Ron!’

‘What the fuck –‘ he said, as he opened his door and saw Cassie, her bathrobe open, her sightless eyes wide with terror.

‘In – there,’ she said, her arm pointing not to her apartment, but to a bare wall. In her panic she had lost her sense of direction. ‘That package. The package.’

‘What?’

‘It contained a couple of – of –‘ She couldn’t spit out the word. ‘The ends of – two or three – ‘

‘Cassie?’

‘F-fingertips.’

7

Wherever she went in the house Kate saw something to remind her of her father. On the walls of the dining room were a number of his watercolours, sketches of Hope at different stages in her life, charcoal drawings of Kate as a girl, quick portraits of some of his showbiz friends and the occasional landscape: the view of the sea from the beach house, a colourful gouache of the Beverly Hills home he had bought way back in the fifties, vistas from various hotel rooms in Europe. There were a number of impossibly glamorous black and white photographs of the couple – her mother with a smile as dazzling as the diamonds that circled her neck, her father in a dinner suit, looking serious, his dark eyes brooding, troubled.

As she walked into his study she almost expected to see him sitting there at his piano, his long, tapering fingers poised above the keyboard. The room was exactly as it had been the day he had died. Unfinished musical scores littered the surface of the piano, the series of seemingly haphazard black notes arranged around the faded paper like the remains of an insect colony. A pair of half-moon glasses lay on the piano stool, as if they were waiting for their absent-minded owner to walk into the room to reclaim them. On the desk, situated by the French doors that looked onto the lush garden, was a mass of paper – a couple of appointment books, old diaries, pages ripped from the New York Times, letters from various orchestras around the world asking about the possibility of performing his work, statements from his agents in America and London, a few of his favourite scores (Prokofiev, Stravinsky) that he seemed to read with the same ease as Kate read novels. On one of the shelves next to his desk were arranged a number of his awards – accolades from the American Film Institute, the British Academy of Film and Television, even an Oscar for his score for The Place Outside. But all these awards, Kate knew, had meant little to her father.

‘Sure the film business has been good to me,’ he had once said to her, during one of his recurring bouts of depression, ‘but really it’s no better than prostitution. I shouldn’t have been seduced by it. I should have held out for something else, something more lasting. Nobody is going to be interested in me after I’m gone.’

She had tried to argue, tried to convince him that wasn’t true. That he was an artist. But he wouldn’t listen. He was just a second-rate composer who hired out his talents to philistines, he said. She had left him sitting at the piano, his head in his hands.

She walked over to the keyboard and pressed one of the keys. The sound was still clear, beautiful. Hope had the piano tuned regularly even though neither she nor her daughter played, probably for the same reason she wouldn’t allow anyone to touch her deceased husband’s things. Both mother and daughter half expected him to return. Kate sat down at the piano and took hold of one of her father’s scores. She opened it at random, amazed that her father – the descendant of poor Russian Jews who had come to America at the very end of the nineteenth century – had possessed what she saw as an extraordinary talent. Did he hear the music in his head before he wrote it down, she always wondered. Or did it form itself when he was sitting at the piano? She tried to imagine doing it herself, willing the sound of music to stir inside her head, but there was nothing, only the rustle of the breeze in the trees outside.

Just then her cell rang. She jumped with a start. She reached inside the pocket of her jeans. It was Josh.

‘Hi, Josh,’ she said.

‘Where are you? Are you okay?’ He sounded worried, anxious.

‘Sure, I’m fine. I’m still at my mom’s place. What’s wrong?’

‘It’s Cassie Veringer. You remember that -’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, images of the past beginning to flash through her mind. ‘Is she okay?’

‘She’s fine. But we’ve just had news that she’s been sent something.’

‘And?’

‘Kate – it was a package containing three human fingertips. We don’t yet know where they are from – who they are from – but as you imagine we’re treating it very seriously.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, already knowing what Josh was going to say.

‘Gleason, yes,’ he said.

‘But he’s dead.’

He hadn’t worked on the Gleason investigation – it was before his time – but Kate had been troubled by nightmares for years afterwards. Since then he had made it his business to look into the case.

‘Josh – he’s dead. Right?’

‘Sorry, that was just Peterson saying something. Yeah, for sure he’s dead.’

‘So it’s just another fruitcake. A coincidence. That’s all it is. Motivated by that recent Times piece.’ Kate was desperate to try and convince herself.

‘Could be, yes.’

Kate stood up and walked over to the French windows. Everything seemed normal. Her mother was outside, talking to one of the gardeners, the elderly, rotund Puerto Rican with the lovely kind smile. The water glistened in the pool. The gates to the drive were locked, secure. So why did she feel so afraid, as if she were being hunted, terrorised? She looked around the room, half expecting to see an intruder standing behind her, watching her, but of course there was no-one there.

‘Kate – you’re not keeping anything from me? Anything I need to know.’

‘No, nothing,’ she said. ‘Why would I do that?’

She could hear someone say something in the background.

‘Okay, Peterson,’ said Josh. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go. Call me later, okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Bye.’

It had to be a fluke, right? The idea that there was some connection between her discovery of that baby girl in the ocean and the package that had been sent to Cassie Veringer was just too awful to contemplate. And it was impossible. Ridiculous. Bobby Gleason had committed suicide seven years ago while on death row in San Quentin State Prison.

Gleason. The name was enough to turn her stomach. She felt the bitter taste of bile in her mouth. She needed a glass of water.

An image of him standing in the court, just after receiving his sentence, flashed into her head. She remembered him turning towards her and smiling, a look that promised unfinished business. She recalled the dreams she had had, the nightmares that haunted her months after he had been imprisoned. The thought that one day he would do to her what he had done to those six women, that he would kidnap her, take her out in that van – which the state prosecutor, Jordan Weislander, had likened to a travelling circus of torture – rape, brutalise and mutilate her until finally she pleaded to be killed. She pictured herself on her knees, naked and degraded, before him, begging him to slit her throat.

Most likely Gleason would have carried on killing had it not been for Cassie Veringer. The court heard how he had assaulted her late one night in a downtown parking lot. He had hit her over the head with a broken bottle, pushed her into his van and tied her up. He had driven out into the desert – the empty quarter Gleason had called it, a place where nobody could hear you scream, a line that he had kept repeating, a phrase from some movie that he had liked. That same night, after taking a mixture of scotch, cocaine and Viagra, Gleason had raped and sodomised her. Cassie, however, had had the foresight – and the courage – to feel his face, even during the most brutal moments of the attack. He had told her that in the morning he would kill her – he didn’t like the fact that she kept touching him, it freaked him out, he said. At some point that night Gleason, in a drug and alcohol-induced haze, must have passed out. Cassie – who miraculously had not lapsed into unconsciousness – had managed to be able to crawl out of the van and disappear into the night. The fact that it had been dark had worked in her favour, as she had used her other, heightened senses to guide her through the arid scrubland to the nearest house.

By the time the police had arrived at the scene her assailant, of course, had disappeared. The cops followed up a number of leads, but they were unable to trace him. It had been at this point that Kate had been called in to work with Cassie on a facial reconstruction of her attacker. The resulting image – taken from a three-dimensional clay sculpture – was released to the media. Three days later, Bobby Gleason was pulled over by a cop, who spotted him driving erratically on the Pasadena freeway. The officer, Dale Hoban, recognised him immediately and, after radioing for help, cuffed and arrested him. Bobby Gleason’s killing spree was over.

Or was it?

Kate swallowed another glassful of water, her mouth suddenly dry and parched.

She had been wanting to get pregnant for the last couple of years. She couldn’t imagine anything more precious to her than a baby.

Then she discovers a dead child in the sea.

For Cassie – a blind woman – her sense of touch was probably her most valuable asset, the sense she prized above all.

Then she gets sent a package containing three human fingertips.

The message was clear, thought Kate, clear and deadly. Each woman was being sent a sign, an omen almost. A warning that said: be prepared to lose what you love.

She needed to talk to Josh. She would have to tell him the truth. Now she had no choice.