(2011) The Gift of Death (7 page)

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.

8

He leant forward through the cloud of smoke and reached out to take the joint.