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.