Always Kiss the Corpse (23 page)

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In the car, Noel turned toward Ursula. “What's the story?”

“No,” said Ursula, “Brady hasn't seen him.”

Brady said to Ursula, “What happened to you?”

Ursula told her what she'd said to the detectives but played down the threats. Brady digested Ursula's tale, took her hand, and assured herself Ursula was okay. “I wonder if your thug was the guy who had an appointment with the sheriff this morning. Big, dark-haired, a mustache. Wearing a leather windbreaker?”

Kyra in the rear-view mirror noted Ursula's nod. “Ready to go?” She started the car and headed up toward route 20, Noel as map-reader.

“He let his elbow touch me,” Brady said, “and he thought I didn't notice. Coming on to me in the sheriff's office.” Her tone became wistful. “I wish these guys could figure out I like girls.” She grinned at Ursula. “One in particular.”

Kyra said, “Oh well. The front seat of this car likes guys so we're 50 percent for each.” They all chuckled.

Ursula, squinting through the rain, said, “Oh. There's one of the docs from WISDOM.”

“Which one?” Kyra screeched to a halt.

“There with the umbrella. Dr. Trevelyan.”

“The endocrinologist?” Kyra flung the gearshift into park. “Justasec.” She leapt out.

Noel, Brady and Ursula watched Kyra wave, shout, flag him down. He stopped. He listened. Great head of white hair, Noel thought. The doc said something, smiled, continued on his wet way. Kyra ran back to the car and leapt in. “Eight-thirty tomorrow at the harbor. He's getting his boat ready.” Way to get around the clinic gatekeeper!

With the Tracker rolling, Noel asked Brady, “Did you find out about Sandro's loafers?”

“Yeah, when I re-filed the file. Clean.”

“No mud?”

“Nope. Shiny.”

“So,” Kyra mused, “how did he get to the blockhouse? Without picking up mud or grass.”

“No suppositions in the sheriff's files,” Brady said.

Kyra stopped at the light on Route 20. “How do you put up with that Sheriff, Brady?” On green, she turned south.

“Shall I tell them?” Brady asked Ursula in an arch tone.

“Why not?”

“Gun culture,” said Brady.

Kyra guffawed.

“Pardon?” said Noel.

“Burt and I talk guns. Especially antique guns that still work.”

“What do you do with guns?” Noel felt his jaw loosen and consciously clamped it up.

“Well, now I shoot skeet.”

“She's scores well.” Ursula, the proud partner. “Last week she hit fifty consecutive birds.”

“I've just seen an 1890 Greener of Birmingham in mint condition. It's got a varnished walnut stock and they're holding it for me, but I know I can't afford it. It's gorgeous, the bee's knees. We had the sheriff over once to see my guns and we've been to his house. For guns, he doesn't even mind my babe.” She prodded her partner's ribs.

“Do you do dogs too?” asked Kyra. “He sure has a lot of pictures.”

“We don't do dogs,” Brady said firmly. “Cats are okay.”

“What did you shoot before skeets?”

“Skeet. It's singular.”

Noel said, “What is a skeet, anyway?”

Ursula said, “It's two clay birds, and she shot trap before. Which is also a clay bird, but it's propelled from a different house. Skeet comes from a left house and right house, but a trap's let go from a single house right in front.”

More than he wanted to know, Noel thought.

Brady elaborated: “My dad hunted. We had a ranch in Wyoming until I was fifteen, then things happened.” Her tone shrugged. “My brothers and I used to go out with my dad and hunt deer and ducks and elk for the freezer. We ate all the meat we shot.” She sounded both proud and defensive. “Last time we were there, even my sweetie took up arms.” Noel saw, in the rear-view mirror, Ursula put her arm around her lover.

“What sort of guns do you have?” Brady asked Kyra and Noel.

“We don't,” Noel said.

“Detectives without guns?” Brady's voice squeaked with surprise.

“We haven't needed them.”

“You might.”

Half of Kyra's mind had stayed with Sandro's loafers. Why were they clean? Did he have some shoe fetish and wipe the mud off? “By the way, what do you think of the clothes Sandro was wearing when he was found?”

“Oh yeah,” said Brady, “I re-read that when I filed the file.”

“What clothes?” Ursula asked.

“Blue T-shirt, worn dirty sweats, white socks and loafers,” recited Brady.

“There weren't any clothes like that in Sandra's closet when we looked,” Ursula observed.

“They wouldn't be there if they were on her,” said Brady, the sheriff's assistant.

“One set of men's clothes,” Noel said. “His bowling outfit. If he wanted to kill himself—herself—would he have dressed in men's clothes, or women's?”

Brady said, “Since Christmas she most often wore women's. I told you about the lingerie buying trip.”

“No underwear,” said Noel.

“Weird,” said Ursula. “Maybe more conflicted than we knew.”

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For perhaps the first time since Sandro Vasiliadis' suicide, Dr. Richard Trevelyan was thinking clearly. He had two questions: What happened? and, What should I do about it? But there simplicity ended. The second question could wait till Sunday, on the boat. The ocean always helped. He poured himself a beer. Tacking was a lot like mulling, a back and forth kind of progress. He had to be clear. For that detective, too. He shouldn't be talking to her. Luckily he'd been quick to suggest they meet early at the marina by the
Panacea.
With luck it'd be raining and she'd make it short. Or not show.

He had to understand what had happened to Sandro. He didn't dare go further with another patient till he could work out where their mistake lay. The process the two before Sandro had gone through was an elegant correction of a developmental error.

Sandro, like every embryo, had started out female. Sufficient fetal androgens such as testosterone helped transform the embryo to male. In Sandro and many of those who came to WISDOM for transgendering, that process had derailed. The sex of a fetus is initiated by a single gene, the Testicular Determining Factor; TDF sets loose a cascade of determining genes. For reasons still not clear, the fetus that became Sandro was only partially subjected to such a gene shower. With a range of hormonal treatment, much of the transformation could be either completed, in female to male transgendering, or reduced, for male to female. Then only the cosmetic transformation remained. But such transformation involved surgery and pain, always physical and, because not gradual, often psychological.

The WISDOM team understood that obviating either kind of pain would require breaking new ground. Such a discovery would bring immense renown and a great deal of money to the clinic and to its funder, Bendwell Pharmaceuticals. Four years ago the incredible breakthrough had happened.

For the first two patients, everything worked as predicted. Then something went wrong with Sandro. What? Richard sipped his beer. He felt pretty sure that the problem lay not in some recent mistake, but in a misunderstanding going back months, even years.

In the beginning the team had agreed the way to go was to find a hormone made according to instructions from a gene that would initiate the complex job of making genitalia. They needed, specifically, a hormone that said, make female genitalia.

For nine years Lorna, with Terry's help, conducted research into hermaphroditic fish families. The successful results came from the protandrial and the bi-directional groups. WISDOM's partners had therefore agreed that for the next years the clinic's primary research would be devoted to male to female transgendering. The work had gone well, and remarkably quickly. Lorna and Terry, with Richard's input, had been able to isolate a neurohormone, which they called percuprone, secreted by the cerebral ganglion that stimulated the hermaphroditic gonad. When injected into a male mouse, in seven cases out of ten it became functionally and morphologically female. It didn't work the other way around, no female to male results, but they had to try.

Their second success was with the black hamlet, which practiced egg trading. Prior to a sunset simulated in the lab, two black hamlets met by the reef in the aquarium. Through some mechanism none of the researchers could understand, the hamlets agreed to trade; they each showed agreement with a head-snap. The WISDOM team gathered to witness this, and they were amazed. Suddenly one hamlet was female, and she gave her eggs to be fertilized by the other. In exchange, the hamlet that did the fertilizing, now also turned female, dropped her own eggs, which were then fertilized by her partner, who for this purpose had become male.

From the black hamlet they had isolated a norepinephrine-like hormone which they called hipophrine, or hipop. Hipop activated the initiation and the termination of sex-reversal. And hipop, when received by a male mouse, also turned it into a female six times in ten.

But, remarkably, when doses of the two were given simultaneously, a ratio of 1.2 parts hipop to 1 part percuprone, almost every mouse transformation was a triumph. They tried rabbits. A 98 percent success rate. Then came an obvious mistake, too obvious now. Bendwell could've helped them fast-track it through FDA. They'd argued; Richard should have argued harder. Stock, Gary and Lorna were clear: skip the monkeys, a mass of research now showed that mammals shared so much DNA, mice and rabbits were close enough: worth the risk. And it had worked! Two men had become the complete woman each had always felt himself to be. Or rather, nearly complete; neither developed a uterus. But reproducing as women was of no interest to them.

Something had gone wrong with Sandro. How? The huge testes Sandro had shown him— Dreadful. Richard pored through journals, consulted dozens of books, tracked down hundreds of sites on-line. Nothing. He remembered an early bit of research at the lab. Couldn't place it. Terry would know. He finished his beer, and poured another.

Terry came home at six. “Hi.” She hung up her wet coat.

“Glad you're home.” She looked tired. Lines from cheekbones to mouth, more gray in her short curly black hair. Just fifty-three, but she refused to touch it up. Aging naturally, she called it.

“How're you doing?”

“Approaching adequate.” He raised his glass. “Want one?”

“Love one.” He poured her a beer. “Why adequate?”

“I still haven't figured out whether to go to the police.”

She clinked her glass to his. “Not much to be gained.”

“Not for Sandro, no, or even for the clinic. But for me? I'm not sure.” He sipped. “Listen, I'm going to take
Panacea
out.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Sunday morning. Think this all through on the water.”

“Most important is figuring what went wrong. The police can't help you there.”

“Remember, six or seven years ago you were working on something where the male had huge gonads?”

Terry smiled. “The guys in the lab loved it. But it was a dead end.”

“Can you find it?

She thought. “Is it important?”

“Probably not.”

“I may have transferred it from my old computer.” She went to her study. It took her eight minutes. “Here it is,” she called. He came in. His glass was full again, she noted.

He said, “Maybe I should forget about the boat, just see the police tomorrow.”

She stood, took his drink, set it down and hugged him. He hugged her back. She said, “The police can't help, Richard. But you're right, take
Panacea
out. It'll do you both good.”

They held each other for a minute, then she pulled back. “Want to read this?”

On the screen, the lab's research on the midshipman, a fish found off the west coast of North America. Two kinds of males. The Type Ones matured slowly but got to be larger, and their vocal systems, which they used for courting, developed great strength. Their gonads made up 1 percent of their weight. They built careful nests, and hummed to attract females. Type Twos matured quickly, 9 percent of their body weight was taken up by their gonads. They didn't hum. They stole nests and females from Type One males.

Terry said, “What do you weigh these days, Richard?”

“Maybe one-sixty.”

“If you were a midshipman your equipment would weigh over fourteen pounds.”

Richard shuddered. “Like Sandro.” He reached for his beer. “I'll be in the garden.”

“Take a raincoat.” Terry smiled.

He left. She picked up the phone and called Lorna. “Hi. Can we meet? Richard's still pretty upset . . . Okay, the lab . . . Eight's fine.”

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Where the hell were they going? Right after Miss Brady's sickening kiss with that woman, they'd driven out to route 20 and turned south. Just drop Miss Brady and go your stupid way! He held a couple of hundred yards back, though with the rain it wasn't likely they'd notice. He followed the Tracker, which, given a woman driver and the wet road, roared along pretty fast. She slowed through Greenbank. He had to brake. Women drivers.

He drove into Freeland and out. The Tracker ignored the turn-off to Langley. Heading to the ferry? But then the Tracker turned right. The sign said, Cultus Bay Road. Another turn, and Vasily followed behind. He checked the road names as he went, have to retrace his steps, damn few houses around, nobody to ask, and he'd be fucked if he got himself lost on this island after dark. Another turn, onto Logchurch Road— Shit, he knew exactly where they were headed. Which meant the man and the woman in the Tracker were the detectives. Shitcrapfuck.

The Tracker pulled into a driveway. Vasily slowed and glanced down it. Long and curvy, he couldn't see a house or the Tracker. He pulled past, U-turned, parked on a shoulder fifty feet away. Gray and wet. He marched back to the drive and headed down. Around a curve and there stood a house, the Tracker parked in front. Everything underfoot was soaking, puddles and mud owned the driveway, his shoes soggier than at the Longelli construction site and the bottom of his pant legs soaked wet into his socks. Driveways should be paved. Fuck, he hated the country.