“We know that at least two sharks tore her legs off. There were teeth marks on the lower back. Catsharks, if you really want to know.”
The smell of ether was making him feel dizzy.
“No head injuries,” he said, as if thinking aloud. “If she didn’t fall from the rocks, where did the blood come from to attract the sharks?”
“From somewhere else!” Amelia replied with scientific logic.
He was thinking the same thing. The injury must have been in the lower part of her body. Apart from the femoral artery, there were no lesions that could have caused her death.
“How about the sexual organs?” Osborne resumed. “How were the sexual organs?”
“Female. The questions you ask!”
“No wounds to the pubis?”
“No,” she said. “The sharks spared that.”
There was a moment’s hesitation in the room. Amelia had put on some light makeup this morning, something she didn’t often do. She had actually made quite a good job of it, but he was looking at her without seeing her, lost in thought, with that face of his—like a disfigured angel. Amelia’s own nose seemed to hurt in sympathy.
“Can you do something for me?” he asked.
Yes, anything.
“That depends,” she said out loud. “What?”
Osborne shook a small plastic sachet between his thumb and index finger. “Can you run a test on this for me?”
Emerging as abruptly from her daydreams as she had plunged into them, Amelia peered closely at the sachet and discovered a hair, blond verging on light brown. Her eyes opened wide.
Like Globule, he thought, only less stupid.
“Where’s this from?” she asked, already knowing the answer. She remembered him on the beach, stroking the dead woman.
“Joanne Griffith.”
“And you’ve only just brought it to me?”
“I forgot.”
She gave him a sidelong glance. “You’ve got some nerve, you know.”
“It doesn’t matter if you believe me or not,” he said, touching her hand. “Can you run a test on it?”
His hand wasn’t burning, it was as cold as death.
“A test? I’d like to but . . . I’d have to inform the Chief Medical Examiner first.”
“It’s you I’m asking, not Moore.”
Disconcerted, Amelia hesitated. Osborne had turned up out of the blue with a hair from the drowned woman and was asking her to run a test on it without informing her boss. She’d definitely be risking her career.
“Have you any idea what I stand to lose?”
“A lab assistant’s job in Auckland,” he replied.
“Why would I do something like that?”
“I can’t explain it to you, not now.” He was getting impatient. “Can you help me, yes or no?”
His sick eyes glittered in the fluorescent light, like a gilded trap he was setting her.
Amelia slipped the sachet into the pocket of her white coat. “All right, I’ll see what I can do.”
6.
Dr. Beevan pulled a long face. At the police medical center, everyone called him Bob. Outside, he wore casual clothes and lived in a house decorated by his wife with their children, Michael and Patrick, two kids with peasant faces of whom he was very proud, and Max, the dog. But today there was something indecent about the nice quiet life he enjoyed.
Jon Timu buttoned up his shirt. “How long do I have left?”
Beevan shrugged. “That depends. How are you feeling?”
“Not too good. Answer my question.”
Beevan was a doctor, not a clairvoyant. He felt bad about Timu, but there was no point in deceiving him anymore. “Two months,” he said. “Maybe three.”
Timu didn’t bat an eyelid. He probably already knew.
Dr. Beevan had been treating Timu since he joined the force, and had shared everything with him, starting with Helena’s death, a long-drawn out process that the doctor had finally agreed to shorten. To be more precise, Beevan had helped Timu perform euthanasia on his wife. Drunk on morphine, the poor woman had had neither the strength nor the mental faculties to give her consent. Timu had himself pressed the plunger of the syringe.
