Блейз Клемент - Duplicity Dogged Тhe Dachshund

In the Medical Examiner’s office, we sat for a few minutes in a sterile waiting room. I looked around and thought about the number of people who had sat in these plastic chairs waiting to identify a loved one. At least I had been spared that when Todd and Christy were killed. Todd’s lieutenant did it for me, and the ME’s report to me had been mercifully brief. Massive head injuries had killed Christie. A crushed chest had killed Todd. Death becomes outrageously impersonal when it has come by accident. Reports take on an objective distance that is absent when death has been deliberately inflicted.

Guidry pulled a copy of a photograph from his pocket and handed it to me.

“Do you know who this is?”

It was a slim dark-haired young man, late teens or early twenties. He wore tennis whites and had a tennis racket slung over his shoulder and a shy smile on his face. I studied the features closely, thinking it might be somebody I’d known in high school.

“He looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t place him. Who is it?”

“Nobody knows. That’s the picture that was on Stevie Ferrelli’s body.”

I looked at the photo again. Stevie’s killer must have shown it to her just before he killed her.

“He looks a little like Stevie. Maybe it was her brother.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. A brother who met with some tragedy that would hurt Stevie to remember.”

“Did you show it to Denton?”

“He didn’t know who it was. Or at least he claimed he didn’t. His wife didn’t know either.”

“What about Stevie’s relatives?”

“So far as we know, there aren’t any. She seems to have no background, no history. Denton Ferrelli says Conrad married her in Europe, but he doesn’t know where she came from.”

“She told me they were at Yale together.”

“She could still have come from Europe.”

“She didn’t have an accent.”

A shadow crossed his eyes. “A lot of foreigners speak fluent English.”

I couldn’t believe Denton Ferrelli wouldn’t know where his sister-in-law came from, but the Medical Examiner stepped to the door then and called us into her office, and Guidry put the photo back in his pocket. A tall Cuban-American woman, Dr. Corazon’s almond eyes were shaded with fatigue as she motioned us to chairs in front of her desk. She ran a slim hand over cropped silver hair as we got ourselves seated.

Without any preamble, she said, “Stevie Ferrelli started life as a male.”

Guidry leaned forward. “You mean she—”

“I mean she had sex-change surgery.”

I said, “But she was so feminine.”

Dr. Corazon gave me a look that dripped battery acid. “Probably why she didn’t like having a penis.”

Guidry shook his head slightly, like clearing his ears, and that seemed to annoy the doctor.

“Look, in the beginning there’s no difference between boy babies and girl babies. They have the same mound of cells that will become sex organs. If the embryo gets a supply of androgen, those cells will form a penis and testicles. If it doesn’t, the cells will form vagina and vulva. But it’s all the same tissue. If nature has made a mistake and sent androgen to an embryo that grows up to be a woman in every other sense, it’s a simple thing to rectify. Make an incision down the seam of the penis, take out the meatus, sew it back up and invert the empty casing into the peritoneal cavity to form a vagina. Attach the glans for a clitoris, snip out the testes, tuck the edges of the testicular sac under, and—voilà—you have vaginal lips. For all practical purposes, there’s no difference between a surgically corrected woman and one born that way.”

Guidry had tightly crossed his legs while she talked, and his forehead had a glassy sheen. His voice went up an octave too. “For all practical purposes?”

“For sexual intercourse, for sexual pleasure. Stevie Ferrelli couldn’t have children, but in every other way she was a woman.”

Guidry turned to me. “Did you know this?”

I shook my head. “I had no idea.”

Dr. Corazon said, “In terms of a homicide investigation, it has no bearing whatsoever. Stevie Ferrelli was the wife of Conrad Ferrelli. She died early in the morning, probably between five and six A.M. She died of respiratory failure the same way her husband did. There was no indication of sexual assault. It took less time to pinpoint the cause because we were ready for it this time. Somebody gave her a massive shot of succinylcholine, also known as suxamethonium chloride. Trade name Scoline.”

She turned to me and said, “You’ve probably heard of it as curare.”

I didn’t know why she thought I needed that explanation, but she was right. I’d heard of curare but not those other names.

She said, “We found the same needle puncture in her gluteus that her husband had. Spectrographic analysis found four hundred milligrams of the drug in her tissue. That’s exactly the same amount found in Conrad Ferrelli. To give you an idea of how much that is, the amount of Scoline used to temporarily paralyze lungs during surgical procedures is one milligram for every kilogram of body weight, somewhere around fifty milligrams. The amount of succinylcholine in either of the Ferrellis’ tissues would have paralyzed a thousand-pound animal.”

I said, “Why do you say animal? I mean, why animal instead of person?”

She nodded at me as if I were a student who had asked a smart question. “Because the drug in large amounts like that is sometimes used to restrain animals during transfer or medical treatment.”

“Like elephants?”

“Most veterinarians don’t use succinylcholine with elephants anymore because it’s so cruel. About the only time it’s used with animals now is for restraining crocodiles and alligators during capture.”

“Could it have been in a dart instead of a hypodermic needle?”

“Possibly. The puncture wound would be the same.”

Guidry said, “Is the drug sold in darts already loaded with certain amounts?”

The ME shrugged. “You’d have to ask a veterinarian that question, but it certainly could be, and it would be safer for the person using it. Not that it’s ever safe. Four hundred milligrams would temporarily paralyze a thousand-pound alligator, but if you accidentally stick yourself with that dart, you’re dead.”

Guidry spent a few more minutes getting forensic details of studies done, of liver inflammation as a sequela of the drug, but I didn’t pay attention. My mind was on the fact that I had just met a man who made his living capturing snakes and alligators. A man who used a dart gun loaded with a drug to paralyze the alligators he caught. A man who was out to kill me.

I knew when the conversation ended only because Guidry stood up. I rose to my feet as well.

Dr. Corazon gave me a curious glance, probably wondering why Guidry had brought me, and gave Guidry a manila envelope containing her report. We said our good-byes and went out to the parking lot. Both of us were silent. I didn’t know about Guidry, but the day’s accumulation of shocks was making me punchy.

He said, “You want to get something to eat?”

Now that he mentioned it, I realized I was hollow as a barrel.

We walked across the street to a place where hospital personnel can get breakfast all day and slid into a booth against the wall. A waitress was at our table almost before we were settled, standing with her order pad ready.

I ordered a chef’s salad; Guidry ordered an omelet with hash browns and bacon.

After we’d stipulated caffeinated coffee, not decaf, and gone through the routine of choosing salad dressings and crispness of bacon—oh, my gosh, do I love bacon, but I have to draw the fat line somewhere—we sat without speaking until the waitress brought our coffee.