(2011) The Gift of Death (2 page)

‘
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.’