Expectant, page 17
I had found myself asking that question: what would I do for my baby? And even though this poppet wasn’t even born yet, the definitive answer was anything.
Someone had asked our victim for a very personal donation.
We really needed to find that woman.
CHAPTER 43
Last night I’d finally stood at the door of the baby room and contemplated diving in. But one look at the enormity of the task had produced an attack of paralysis by indecision, which had required immediate therapy with Milo and Toffee Pops. This morning I was feeling a tad guilty about the cop-out, Maggie’s words ringing in my brain. And these thoughts had insisted on intruding while I continued my research into childhood diseases – probably as a diversion from the depressing topic, if I was being honest. It meant that by 10.00am I was well and truly ready for a change of task and scenery.
My hormones had demanded a visit to Side On Café this time, and a date with a Danish pastry and a hot chocolate. I wasn’t quite sure what excuses I would use for my food obsession when I wasn’t conveniently carrying a voracious, sweet-craving parasite. I was sure I’d come up with something convincing, though. I liked the semi-industrial feel of the place and the fact I could sit there and see the ovens my treats came out of. We were constantly being told we should get closer to the origins of our food. I was brought up on a farm and had shot dinner before, so that was a big tick in that department. As far as I was concerned, this counted too.
I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, enjoying the array of felines that seemed to take up most of it, getting annoyed by the number of baby-product advertising posts, and wondering how Mum’s fishing in the knitting group was going when a message from Paul flashed up:
Where u?
He didn’t believe in wasting keystrokes.
I sent a photo of my half-eaten morning tea.
I watched as the three little dots did their Mexican wave.
Surprise surprise.
Heart smiley wink
Guess wot?
What?
U never guess.
Then why ask?
Coz.
Eyeroll emoji
Another baby.
?
Found another baby
WTF?
Yup.
He? She?
She
Where?
St Patrick’s.
Safe?
Yup
Poo emoji.
Yup.
CHAPTER 44
My stomach wasn’t feeling the happiest after guzzling down the remainder of the hot chocolate and stuffing too much pastry in my mouth at once in my efforts to get back to the station to find out what the hell was going on. Fortunately it was only a short waddle down the road, but I could feel all manner of things sloshing and protesting inside me, including the child.
My mind ran a rapid-fire series of questions as I wove my way through the scattering of folk waiting at the stops along the bus hub. Fortunately for me, people took one look at my condition and cleared a path.
Whose baby was this?
Why did they leave it?
Whose baby was the other one?
Was the baby I found the Newmans’ baby, after all?
We’d assumed it was, but what if it wasn’t, and this new baby was really the Newmans’ and they’d been busy loving and bonding with the wrong one?
How would we find out whose was whose?
Actually, I answered that one before the thought had entirely formed in my head, DNA testing would show that, but how quickly would they get the results back? Would a quick blood typing settle it?
And in the meantime, what would happen with the babies?
Would they leave Hope with the Newmans?
How would the family feel about all of this?
Hadn’t they been through enough already without having to doubt if they even had the right child?
Jesus, it was the stuff of nightmares.
CHAPTER 45
This investigation was starting to feel like a juggling act in which, every few seconds, someone tossed in a new ball. First there was a murder that turned into a murder-kidnapping. Then a baby turned up. And now there were two babies. Chuck in a ransom for a baby that wasn’t even there to ransom, and it felt like we were diving to catch the balls as they fell. Everything we were doing was reactive, rather than implementing a considered plan of attack. It sucked, and my frustration was shared by everyone else on the team. Chuck in the unrelenting attention of the media and those higher up in the police food chain demanding results and it was a recipe for stress and a mess.
For now my efforts were pointed in the direction of finding the mother of the latest arrival. From the moment she was discovered and rushed to the hospital for a check-over it was clear this baby was a fresh-out-of-the-oven newborn. She had been left in the sanctuary of a church. She was still covered in vernix, that creamy coating that protected babies’ skin, and instead of being carefully clothed and wrapped in blankets as baby Hope had been, she had been naked and loosely bundled in a puffer jacket, complete with her umbilical cord and placenta still attached.
She was a small baby, weighing in at six pounds two and looked to be of European heritage. Other than being dehydrated, she was healthy, had good levels of alertness and was perfectly formed. The attending paediatrician’s comments were that we really needed to be searching for the mum, because in her experience working overseas, babies abandoned like this were often from teenage mothers who had been hiding their pregnancies, or mothers who were homeless and vulnerable. She was hugely worried that there was a woman out there who had just given birth, probably alone, and was in dire need of medical attention, as well as emotional support. The thought of anyone giving birth alone was terrifying, and now I was worried about her too. My hyperactive and hormone-doused imagination was working overtime on worst-case scenarios, and I had to reign it in to focus on the task at hand.
The puffer jacket she was found in was a black Kathmandu brand, pretty much standard issue in Dunedin, as they were often on sale, and everyone loved a bargain. It was frequently the first purchase of the hordes of teenagers escaping home and invading the University of Otago, particularly the Aucklanders who discovered pretty quickly the vagaries of our weather, and that short shorts and flimsy tops were going to get you hypothermia rather than a tan. In Dunedin it was perfectly acceptable to wear a puffer jacket to the beach in the height of summer. The coat was a women’s size fourteen, which was the average Kiwi woman size, so that didn’t narrow the field down any. Alas, the previous owner hadn’t conveniently sewn their name onto the collar, or their mum hadn’t.
The news of this second baby had got out pretty quickly as the main media outlets covered the story from our statement. The police had wanted to make it clear this was a freshly newborn child, and that it was unlikely related to the current murder investigation. The release was carefully worded to stress that the police’s primary concern was for the mother, and that she was safe and not in need of medical attention. Whereas the local rag had played that angle, other media hadn’t been so kind and were vilifying the mother for abandoning a vulnerable newborn, no thought given to her circumstances. It was with disgust that I noted some of them had even headlined it on their websites under their ‘crime’ banner. It wasn’t a crime, for fuck’s sake. Something like that was only ever done out of desperation. I’d made the mistake of reading some of the comments beneath the articles, and that had made me angry. Then I made the worse mistake of following the story as it spread across Twitter and other social media, and that had left me feeling sick. People could be so bloody vicious. The vitriol was appalling. I could imagine the poor mother out there somewhere, clicking on the news to make sure her baby was at least found safe, and being bombarded by a wave of hatred and self-righteous indignation. It was not going to encourage her to come forward – if anything it would guarantee that she never did.
I’d already been on the phone to the welfare agencies and charitable organisations that worked with our homeless to see if they had been supporting any women who had been expecting, but that had been a dead end. Next step was to phone the high schools – the girls’ and co-ed ones – and then the university halls of residence. Others in the team were out door-knocking at the various shelters and boarding houses around the city and following up with medical practices and urgent medical centres. We could strike it lucky, or we would have to rely on someone ringing in concerned about a friend or a relative.
It was too many balls up in the air.
CHAPTER 46
After what had felt like a futile day at work we got brave and assembled the cot. We felt so proud of the fact we’d managed it without a) having a concerning number of bolts left over, or b) having a flaming row, that we thought we’d reward ourselves with a session on the computer, looking up how you could store cord blood. Yes, we were that sad couple.
It was all well and good getting cord blood, by means fair or foul. But once you had it, what did you do with it other than bung it a container and put it in the fridge? A quick hunt had revealed that cord-blood banking was available overseas, and then a little further digging revealed, lo and behold, it was an actual thing in New Zealand. Who knew? There were companies that offered that service here, for a fee, of course.
‘Click on that one,’ I said, directing Paul from my wingman position standing by his shoulder. My back wasn’t up to hunching over a keyboard at this exact moment in time.
He duly clicked as commanded and the ‘How much does it cost?’ question on the FAQs menu opened up.
‘Doesn’t actually answer the question, does it?’
Saying ‘pay a deposit’ then giving the deposit prices for cord blood, or cord blood and tissue, was cheating as far as I was concerned.
‘They probably only let you know when you’re most of the way through the enrolment process and unlikely to back out.’
‘Lure ’em in, get them hooked. But the deposit price isn’t too bad,’ Paul said.
‘I suppose not. For everything else on the planet most deposits are around 10%, so doing the maths, we could stab a guess at fifteen hundred dollars – two thousand, five hundred, all up.’
‘Ouch. That’s not so appealing.’
‘And looking at how it’s cryo stored, there’s probably an annual fee as well.’ I wondered how long you could store samples like this before they became unusable? I know there were things lurking in our freezer that were probably way past their best-by date, and some mystery meats that had been there for years. They were a casserole waiting to happen. There wasn’t any information on the website about the ongoing costs.
‘Mind you, if you were needing to go down this path as a medical solution, then I guess you’d just do it and the cost wouldn’t come into it.’ I had to agree with him there.
‘I know if it was us we’d find a way, even if it meant mortgaging the house.’
‘Um, small problem there – we don’t have a house to mortgage.’
Fair point. I didn’t think our landlord would be too impressed if we tried to sell her property out from under her. And we weren’t going to be able to afford to get on the property ladder anytime soon.’
‘We’d have to sell a fair few cheese rolls to fundraise it.’
‘Doable, though.’
True. Everyone down here loved a cheese-roll fundraiser. So families were peddling them, and there seemed to be continuous supply of the rolls at work. The local schools’ sports and arts economy relied on this kind of fundraising.
‘I see that they send you out a kit that you take along to the birth, and you get your lead maternity career, obstetrician or midwife to do the collection. Then you call the courier to pick it up. But does it say anything about the actual timing of when you take the sample? How soon after the birth?’
There were so many scenarios I’d played in my head about the killer’s motive, and how Aleisha had been killed down that isolated alley. If the whole thing was in fact motivated by getting samples, given the environment, did they get them at all and did they get them in time? And I didn’t want to even think about the potential for contamination down there. It wasn’t exactly a sterile environment.
‘Good question. Wouldn’t have been easy doing anything down that alley when you were worried someone might come along. And bloody dark for starters. They might not have actually managed it.’ Sometimes I wondered if Paul read my mind. I was pretty sure Maggie could. Maybe it was an easy read.
Paul clicked through a few more screens before finding one with the relevant information.
‘Says here it has to be immediately after the birth for the blood, once the cord has been clamped and cut. Cord-tissue sample is taken once the placenta is delivered.’
‘I’m pretty confident there wouldn’t have been any handy health professionals down the alleyway in the middle of the night, so they would have just had to do it themselves.’
‘It would have been past most health professionals’ bedtime.’ He scrolled down a little further. ‘It states it’s painless for the mother and baby. If the kit had everything they needed, if indeed they just happened to have a kit in an alleyway in the middle of the night, then yeah, it’s a possibility.’
A shudder shook through me. I was also pretty confident that the mother in this instance experienced a shit ton of pain.
‘Can you remember from the reports how the baby’s cord was tied off?’ Paul asked.
‘There wasn’t anything tied around it when I saw her being examined in the hospital, and I don’t know if they can tell what was used after the fact – seems unlikely. It would be interesting to know how they did it though. We can check in the morning.’
Paul reached over, absentmindedly grabbed a couple of scorched almonds from the bowl on the table and shoved them in his mouth.
‘So you’ve managed to get a sample, courier has picked it up, and it’s safely with the storage company. Then what?’
I managed to interpret the sentence through the chewing. I was glad he was facing away from me. My brain was still processing information from a few steps back.
‘Wonder if we could get a warrant for information from the blood banks on any recent deposits?’
Paul was accustomed to the backward-and-forward way I operated and was able to keep track.
‘Not based on our supposition and reckons.’
‘Didn’t think so. We’d have to be pretty certain this was the path taken.’
‘Yup.’
‘So back to your original question: then what?’
‘Yeah, it’s all very well and good if they’ve got the blood for the stem cells, but then what do they do with it? They’re hardly going to be able to do a transplant themselves, are they?’
‘Not unless they’re cancer specialists or haematologists.’
‘Even if they were, I’m sure there’s processing and dealing with the cells involved. That’s hardly something you could do in the kitchen at home.’
‘Certainly not in ours.’ Dishes and clear benches weren’t our strong point, or priority. As far as I was aware, no one had died from not doing the dishes, or any kind of housework, really.
‘And how would they treat the child without arousing suspicion?’
A few things that had been swirling in my brain did a little clunk into place. The sensation felt a bit like an ear pop.
‘Oh, that’s quite clever really.’
Paul looked up at me with a quizzical expression on his face.
‘Not me, I take it?’
‘Well, not this time. Them.’
‘Enlighten me.’
‘I’ve been wondering – why the cord blood, if there are far more easy and available ways of getting stem cells, from bone marrow, etcetera?’
‘Yes?’
‘Because with cord blood, if you had a willing donor, or in this case, if you stole it, for want of a better word, you can get the cells without needing a hospital procedure.’
‘So you can fly under the radar, as it were.’
‘Yes. To go to those extremes they must have tried treatment through the existing systems, but there hadn’t been any matches or success, so they found an alternate route.’
‘Makes sense?’
‘But wait, there’s more.’
‘There always is,’ he said.
‘By getting the samples stored by a third-party company, a professional company with a good name, they immediately legitimise them.’
‘Laundered.’
‘Precisely. That gives them the option of seeking treatment privately without arousing suspicion. They can just say, “Hey, we’ve got these samples that were donated to us. Can you use them for treatment? We’ll pay.”’
‘Money always talks. Wonder if there’s a way of hooking back into the public health system if you come to light with the donor goods? We’ll have to check that.’
‘Add it to the list.’
He went back for another round of almonds. ‘You know, it all sounds feasible. Fantastical, but feasible.’
‘In the absence of other theories, I think it’s a line of enquiry worth pursuing.’
I’d been trying to resist the scorched almonds, but gave up and grabbed a fistful before Paul ate them all.
‘But where would you even start. I mean properly start?’ I asked.
‘Well, there must be a limited number of children in Dunedin with disorders that would need a stem-cell transplant, so we could start by looking there.’
‘I don’t fancy our chances of being given any specific information on families that are dealing with that, Privacy Act and all. And even if we could, that’s going to be tiptoeing on broken glass with a hugely stressed and fragile group of people.’
‘Is there anyone you could talk to – sound them out, see if it’s even a possibility?’
I thought back to the list of people I’d had in mind when enquiring about the amniocentesis. There was the paediatrician from the hospital. ‘I’ve got someone I could try.’
