(2011) The Gift of Death Read Free Page A

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